The Chinese kids wore leather jackets and cheap loafers. Hair with bleached tips. FOBs. We didn’t call them Fresh off the Boat to clown them for being an immigrant. We used the term as a lazy label for a Chinese gang. They didn’t even have to be a gang per se. They just had to mob deep and speak Chinese. They were not unlike my brother and his friends. They’d cuss in Chinese and call each other “nigga.”
At some point during the ride I realized that the Asian kid my friend had bumped into was someone I used to know. He was actually Vietnamese and had hung out at my house once, back in sixth grade, along with a group of other Asian kids. It took me a minute to recall his name. We made eye contact, but he didn’t acknowledge me, so I left it alone. When our stop came, Jesse and I made sure we were first to the rear door. I leapt off the bus, and our friend got yanked back by his backpack, the door closing on him.
He met us later at Jesse’s house. The beatdown lasted only until the next stop, when the driver kicked all of them off. Our friend with the ’fro had the collar of his shirt ripped, and he kept asking us to feel his head for bumps. The story would’ve ended there if not for Martín, Jesse’s cousin, who happened to be over that day. He paced around with a bat preaching payback. We sunk low on the couch. Above us was a painting of two Native Americans sitting on horses in front of a stream. They appeared dignified, even the horses.
The four of us were all the remaining members of NSK, Notorious Sick Kings, a tagging crew we were trying to revitalize, and Martín appealed to this in his Knute Rockne speech. Something about these moments defining us. How did we want our crew to be known? As punk cowards?
As a general rule of thumb, I had avoided fighting. I’d punked out every time I was challenged except once when a guy dared me to meet him by the track at lunch, and I’d only called his bluff because I knew he was more of a punk than me and wouldn’t show. The times I had fought were when the other dude threw the first punch. I’d swing out of reflex. Give me the opportunity to make the first move and I’d wilt.
But I’d decided—enough. I wanted to become someone I could respect, someone courageous. Not Rob’s sidekick. I put myself on a point system. I’d gotten the idea from a self-help book my sister was reading. One point for taking a risk, doing something out of the ordinary: not running off the bus when the driver stood up and screamed at me to stop tagging, asking a girl on the street for her number. One point deducted if I wimped out.
I picked up the other aluminum bat and felt the grip.
“I don’t know,” the kid with the ’fro said. “My head kinda hurts.”
“Fuck that,” I said and we rushed out.
Two stragglers were at the bus stop. One was the Vietnamese kid. They saw us coming and broke with the quickness. They had a block head start, but I almost caught them. I got close enough that I could see the black label sticking up from the Vietnamese kid’s leather jacket. They ducked into a corner store, and I waited for my friends before entering. I was winded and unsure what to do next. We bum-rushed the store, each down a different aisle, but our foes had somehow vanished, as though they’d snuck through a secret portal. I swung my bat at a shelf, packages of ramen noodles, cans of vegetables. The cashier screamed something about the police. On the way out, I swung at the wooden door. I should’ve peeked outside first.
A cop behind his opened car door had his gun drawn on me.
The last time, it was Rob pointing a pistol at me, horsing around.
It was a tiny weapon, a deuce-five. He’d borrowed it for protection. Some Samoans were coming by the rec center looking for him. The origins of the beef were comical.
Rob and I had been riding in a van driven by another friend when Rob, sitting in the front seat, decided it would be funny to toss his Slurpee into the bus in the next lane. When we were younger, we’d throw water balloons at tourists, and though we’d given that up as too juvenile for sixteen-year-olds, Rob occasionally, for old times’ sake, would still do his specialty—hurling a large cup of ketchup at tourists. He’d fill the cup to the rim, ripping through dozens of packets at Wendy’s.
Rob flung the Slurpee through the bus window, and the slushy contents splattered on the passengers, the bus packed with students from another school. The plan was to hit the gas and take off, but we got stuck at the light, the bus and its riders next to us. All we could do was laugh. I found out later that the passenger who had taken the brunt of the Slurpee was a guy who was apparently known as Not-the-Kind-of-Motherfucker-You-Should-Fuck-With. Also on the bus was a group of taggers, one of whom identified Rob as the culprit.
Rob carried the deuce-five around but kept a low profile until things blew over. When he first got his hands on the pistol, he showed it to me in the closed-in stairwell that led to his apartment.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “it ain’t loaded.”
I grabbed the gun and chased him up the stairs, too scared to pull the trigger. He took the gun from me, and we swapped roles. I ran down the staircase and pretended to be shot in the back. Upon turning around and seeing that my assailant was none other than my partner in crime, I
